80 - Cleared

Doss stopped the cart forty feet short of the gate, got down, and looked at the road, and Kalen got down after him and looked at what Doss was looking at.

"Swept," Doss said.

"Eleven years ago."

"No."

Kalen went down on one knee at the edge of the flags.

There was moss in the joints. There was a long drift of leaf mould against the near wall where the wind puts it, and a bird's nest in the gutter mouth of the gatehouse, and eleven winters of grit banked up along the kerb. Under all of it the flags ran clean and level to the gate, and the channel was clear, and nothing had come out of a window into the road and stayed there.

A street goes to pieces from the top down. Slates first, then gutters, then somebody takes a door for firewood, and by the third winter there is lead missing off the church end. Kalen had walked a burnt end every evening of his life and knew the order of it the way you know a hymn.

"Nothing has been taken," he said.

"Say why."

"Because there is nothing in it worth the walk."

The cart was Belk's, borrowed for two days against three weeks of unpaid work on a tenement load-frame in the summer that the mason has refused three times to call a favour. The horse was hired. It had cost Kalen four marks and Doss two days off a wage, and Doss had put the two days in himself before anybody asked him to, which is the whole of what there is to say about Doss.

They had come out along the low road with the wall on their left for the first six miles and nothing on their right at all, past three ward gates with watchmen in them who looked at a reclamation cart and looked away again, and Kalen had spent most of that road expecting rubble. He had a picture of it and he had been carrying the picture since the ninth bell of Tuesday. Roofs down, a gate off its hinges, weeds up to the sills, and somewhere in the middle of it a stone wall with a ledger line cut into it that he was going to have to dig out with a bar.

That is what a ward looks like when it stops. There are four streets of it at the far end of Ashfall and it took nine years to get there.

They put the cart against the gatehouse wall and went in on foot.

The first thing Kalen did was the thing he does, which was to read the board.

Ward Seventeen had a board by the gate the same as Ward Nine. It had a tin frame on it and a glass over the front, which Ward Nine has never had in nine hundred years, and he noticed the glass before he noticed what was behind it.

"There is a notice under here," he said.

"Read it."

"Ward Seventeen. Standing notice. Levy assessed, eighteen point two."

"That is more than ours."

"That is more than ours." Kalen put his sleeve on the glass and moved eleven years off it. "Assessment of T. Ambry in forty-one days."

Doss did not say anything.

Kalen did not do the arithmetic. He had it before he could stop himself, the way he has the bolt count in a gantry before he has decided to look up, and he stood in front of a board in a dead ward with his sleeve on the glass and knew to the day how long his sister had left.

He put it away and it did not go.

"Somebody was coming up," Doss said.

"Somebody was coming up in forty-one days."

"And then?"

"And then the paper stops. There is one notice under that glass and it is the last one they put up."

They went up the main street.

The doors were shut. That was the thing he came back to afterwards, at the table, when Nessa made him say the whole of it in order. Not one door in that ward was standing open. They were shut, and most of them were latched, and four of them on the first street had the latch string pulled through and knotted on the outside, which is what a careful person does on the way out of a house they are locking for somebody else.

The windows were in. There was glass in every window on that street but one, and that one had a slate through it, and the slate was still lying in the room.

"Doss."

"Yes."

"Go in one."

Doss put his shoulder on a door and it opened, because it was latched and not locked.

There was a kitchen with a table and four chairs, three of them under the table and one against the wall. There was a shelf with crockery on it, still in rows. There was a bread board, a knife, and a tin that had gone through eleven winters and was a tin.

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There was no ash in the grate. Somebody had raked it out.

And there was a mark on the door frame at the height of a man's chest where a Hold Fast had come out of a bolt housing, and the shape of it was still legible in the wood, and it had come out clean.

Kalen stood in a stranger's kitchen with his hand on a door frame for rather longer than he meant to.

"It is good work," he said.

"How good."

"Better than mine."

He went round the room reading what was left of what had been taken, which you can do for about twenty years afterwards if the man who did it was any use.

A Carry out of the water yoke on the back of the door. Something slight out of the window catch, gone so cleanly he could not name it. A Fair Wear out of the fire irons, which is not worth the labour at any rate in Kentra and had been taken anyway, because a manifest says everything, and everything means everything.

Nothing torn. Nothing hurried. Nothing killed.

They did the second house and the third, and then they stopped counting the houses and did the street.

It went on being the same. A bed made in an upstairs room with the counterpane turned down at the corner the way a person does it who intends to be back. A pair of boots by a grate, both of them, side by side, which nobody in Ashfall would have left behind at any price. A child's slate on a windowsill with a sum on it, and the sum was wrong, and Kalen stood in front of it for a moment working out where the child had gone astray and then made himself walk out of the room.

They did a shop with the shutters up and the counter wiped and the scale still on it with the weights in the pan. Kalen put his hand out and moved the counterweight along the beam without thinking about it, the way he does at the house, correcting for a pan that runs four percent heavy and has run four percent heavy since before he was born. This one did not need it. It ran true. He stood in a dead shop with his hand on a true scale and found that of everything in that ward it was the thing he liked least.

Then they did the schoolhouse.

There was a register open on the desk and the week in it was finished. Somebody had ruled off under the last name in the week and written the date under the rule and put the pen back in the tray, and Kalen stood in the door of it and did not go in, and then went in, and read the whole of the last page standing up with his hat in his hand.

Forty names in that week and every one of them ticked through to the Friday.

There is a schoolhouse in Ward Nine with a register on the desk in it, open, with a week in it that was never finished, and a woman who came to the door of it every morning for eight years to try to finish it. Kalen had stood on that step in the autumn and counted the names off the roll for her, out loud, in front of eleven people, and he had needed nine days afterwards to be able to say what it cost.

Somebody in Ward Seventeen had ruled off under the Friday and gone home.

He came out into the street and stood in it.

"It is obscene," he said.

Doss waited.

"That is the best clearance work I have ever seen. There is nobody to have done it for and they did it anyway, and they did it to standard." Kalen put his hands in his pockets. "Somebody costed that. Somebody sat at a desk and worked out what it was worth to take a Fair Wear out of a set of fire irons in a house nobody was ever going to sell, and got a figure, and the figure was yes."

"Where are they," Doss said.

"I do not know."

"Say the true thing."

"The true thing is that I have been in eleven houses and a shop and a schoolroom." He heard his own voice go flat and let it go flat. "There is no ash. There is no ruin. There are no graves anywhere I have looked and nothing is broken and the crockery is in rows, and I have not got one single fact about where four thousand people went."

"Then get one."

"There is a paper on the gate. Papers are what I am for."

* * *

The manifest was nailed up at the gate where a manifest is supposed to be nailed up. It was under its own glass in a frame with a lead roof over it about nine inches wide.

Somebody had roofed it.

It ran to sixty-one pages, fixed at the top corner with a brass pin so the pages turn, and Kalen turned all sixty-one of them standing in the road with his shoulder against the gatehouse and Doss holding the lower edge out of the wind.

"Read some of it," Doss said.

"Item four thousand one hundred and nine. Bolt housing, elm and iron, dwelling, Cross Street eleven. Hold Fast, Sound. Recovered whole."

"Go on."

"Item four thousand one hundred and ten. Fire irons, dwelling, Cross Street eleven. Fair Wear, Common. Recovered whole." He turned a page. "Item four thousand one hundred and eleven. Water yoke."

"That is the house."

"That is the house we were standing in. It is in here twice more further down and the second one is the window catch, and it is entered as a Steady, slight, which I could not name off the wood and somebody named off the bench."

Doss thought about that with his hand on the frame.

"How many items."

"Nine thousand two hundred and forty."

"How long."

"Two years," Kalen said. "It is on the head of the schedule. It took them two years and they entered the dates."

He went back to the front of it and read the head, which is where a man of his trade reads first and where he had made himself go last.

Reclaimed to standard. Every recovery graded, entered and warranted. Counted out against the ward roll, building by building, in street order, with a foot rule on the count at the end of every street. The roll is printed at the head of the schedule and it stands at four thousand one hundred and eighty. Countersigned at the foot of all sixty-one pages by the Sedge Counting House as collecting agent, in a small even hand that had not got tired.

There was a line at the head of it for population.

It read nil.

There was no line under it. Kalen went along the whole head of that schedule twice looking for one. There was a line for buildings and a line for bound items and a line for stone and a line for metal and a line for the value of the whole. There was not any line at all for where four thousand one hundred and eighty people had gone.

A manifest is a list of property. There has never been a line on one for people, in nine hundred years, in any ward in Kentra, and there was no reason on earth for there to be one on this.

"Doss."

"Yes."

"Say what you are looking at."

Doss had gone six feet along the wall and was looking through the gatehouse arch at the assembly hall on the far side of the yard.

The doors were standing open. It was the first open door in the ward.

They went across.

The hall was empty and swept and cold, and the light came down out of the high windows in bars, and their boots came back off the far wall a half beat late the way they do in a room built for four hundred people.

The ledger stones had been lifted out of the walls. All of them. There were eleven sockets cut into the stonework at chest height around the room with nothing in them, dressed and squared and empty, and the stones themselves were stacked against the far end in threes with sacking put between them so that they would not chip.

Cut, faced, dressed, each about the size of a hearth back.

Kalen went along the stack with his hand out and put a palm on each one in turn, because that is what you do, and because his hands had got to it before the rest of him had.

Cold. Cold. Cold.

One of them was still warm.